Let's Talk about Us

I've joined a spiritual group that meets on Wednesdays. A thousand repetitive instincts are currently working to make sure I never return, but I've set my intention to keep up with it, because it is casual, moderate, and interfaith. At my first meeting last Wednesday, I think I realized why these instincts are so impossibly flighty. I have no concept of connection.

One of the main tenants of this group is the connectedness of all things. I've looked into it. It's the food chain, the circle of life, the works. In that way, it makes sense, but trying to apply it to my personal life is like dividing by zero. It just doesn't compute.

Growing up in Utah, sometimes dubbed "Mormonia," when you're not a member of the fold and are raised to embrace that fact, you belong to "US," and the Mormons belong to "THEM." It's the same when you go to a Catholic high school. If you cross yourself with a smiley face, it's because you're part of a smaller "US" compared to a greater "THEM." If you're not Catholic, Mormon, Evangelical, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Zoroastrian, or even Atheist, suddenly, tiny you, of "US," are separate from a titanic "THEM." So long as you embrace that separateness, you will never belong to any one of those groups. That's tricky when looking for a place in the world.

That doesn't just apply to religion, mind you. When developing a personality and a relationship with people at large, if you don't want to be too mean, too nice, too smart, too stupid, too funny, too melancholy, too analytical, too spontaneous, too dramatic, too down-to-earth, too admiring, too condescending, too passionate, too apathetic, too macho, too effeminate, et cetera, but you look around and see hundreds of people who are too much of something, suddenly, "US" shrinks to 12-point, Helvetica "ME," and "THEM" becomes the remainder of this blog post.

Twenty-four years down the line, the insanity of this mentality has suddenly become clear. I am actively resisting belonging to any particular group out of fear that belonging to that group would alienate others in other groups. In so doing, I have distancing myself from every group and wondering why no one has decided to join me. Maybe it's just the word "alienation" that's taken me to this extreme. I've been friends with people from all sorts of different backgrounds, so why is it so hard for me to accept that they could be friends with me if I belonged to something that they did not?

I'm going to stick with this group. If I'm going to learn how to progress in life, it will not be alone. Maybe that's the secret to overcoming Asperger's. The more time I spend around people, the less trouble I will have with seeing the truth that there really is no "THEM." It's all "US."

500 Miles in Someone Else's Shoes

I've been hesitating on what to write about the Camino. I'd thought the lessons would all become apparent to me along the Way, but to be honest, they're only just starting to peek out of the shadows. It is like the ease with which one can solve the problems of others but not one's own: the issue has to be seen from a different perspective. Now that it has been nearly a month since I finished walking, the experience is finally folding together to the point where I can start making sense of it.

That's not to say the Camino was completely free of life lessons learned. In fact, I ran into an Italian hippie in Galicia who pointed out that the roads were paved with cow shit (I'd noticed) and said he had the realization one day that the more time he spent watching the road to avoid the cow shit, the more beautiful scenery he was missing. I agreed and added that, even if one steps in the shit, it can still be washed away. However, it was the "missing" aspect that I've only recently begun to notice.

I've been working heavily on another blog, Bill Beaver's Best Laid Plans, a travel blog. As I've been writing and incorporating pictures, I noticed how few pictures I have of some areas and how few are actually of higher quality. This may be a standard ratio among photographers, but it has only highlighted what has been missing: time.

There are ten commandments of the Camino. I have been unable to locate a full list online, only references to the list I saw but did not fully process in Castrojeríz, but one stands out right now: You shall not change your pace to match another's.

I had mapped out my Camino to start on March 3rd and conclude on April 8th. A day behind in Pamplona, I figured I would sacrifice a day in Santiago to compensate. Instead, I met two other peregrinos with whom I decided to keep pace, not the least reason of which being that one was close in age to me and attractive. I kept pace with both of them for half the Camino, hurrying through some towns I'd originally planned to explore in more depth. I caught up to my missing day and surpassed it. True, we seldom walked together for long, and by the midpoint of the Camino, both went further than they'd said, and I was left behind.

Someone wiser could have seen these two as faces who had entered and left my life, as is the natural way of things, but instead, feeling hurt and abandoned, I continued at the pace they had set. I made photographic sacrifices: it was too much of a hassle to take out the camera, and I was losing time and distance behind them. What if I didn't see them again in Santiago before they left, four days before I arrived? It became this huge, important matter that I somehow catch up with them, so much so that, even on the days where I decided to go slower, I still put in the same distances and made the same photographic sacrifices. I stopped making friends in the same way as I walked. I became hurried and impatient with people who wanted to chat. I was pushing myself to catch up with someone else's Camino and had given no more than a fleeting glance at my own Camino and what it meant to me. That, at least, has affected my journal and work afterward, especially as I read more into these places and learn more of what I missed.

Now, that being said, 480 miles is a long walk with lots to see and limited memory card space. I was subject to the complaints of my body and the more pressing matters at hand than just snapping photos, like where to rest. However, the fact remained that the complaints of my body were directly proportional to the number of kilometers walked in a given day, as set by my desire to catch up to my past friends in the future. This is a very important parallel to daily life and one that demands awareness.

I'm a people pleaser. After a year in Codependents Anonymous, this still presents a problem, especially in the way I pace my life. Right now, I am unemployed, but my biggest concern right now is not that I'm running out of money (I'm okay for a while longer); my biggest concern is that I will have to justify myself to my mother. Each time I get a text message and see it is from her, even if it's a funny picture of the dog, I immediately get ready to explain my actions in a way that she will find acceptable and thus let me off the hook. It is a mentality that regularly takes me away from what I was originally doing. I'm trying to walk her Camino.

On a project level, for the last year, I have been floundering in a field of non-creativity, owing to one of my college lessons that said something to the effect of "You only have a few years to make it in the business." This thought led me to blaze through and submit my first screenplay to multiple companies, a screenplay with which I was not personally happy but which I thought the readers needed to see soon. I jumped to match their pace and sent them inferior work. I have tried to churn out short scripts for my director friends quickly, the idea being turnover, turnover, turnover. Thus far, I have not had anything produced because the work is hurried and inferior. I'm noticing the same in my photography, ignoring lighting and rushing framing to churn out content before I'm overlooked by someone who does not exist. I am walking the Camino of the professional world.

In romance, well, hell, what haven't I already said about romance? To the present, I've operated my relationships on the idea that my date needed constant entertainment, a complete sharing of interests, and anything else they may request, as soon as they request it. Otherwise, they would leave me behind. And this was important to me. I have put down my own work, beliefs, and interests because someone else, whom I happened to find attractive, found them subpar. I have been walking the Camino of everyone I ever dated and completely lost myself in them each time.

So what now? The physical Camino is over, and now I'm almost a month back in Los Angeles. The question now floating in and out of my head is "How do I get back on my Camino?"

It's not an easy process. I've built so much of my worldview on expectation and assumption that the idea of dropping them is confusing. I've lost so much of my ideation process in the grand hurry that I now have to dig deep in order to get it back. I have to find a job that, yes, will pay the bills, but at the same time, I may also need to be a little more picky with what I choose instead of just picking something to be employed again and not have to explain. Hovering over this is the concern that, if I couldn't figure this out with all my alone time on the Camino, how could I possibly figure it out back in the big city of LA?

The process is already starting. It takes a return to the old world to see what has been picked up from the new one (or is that reversed?). Writing Bill's adventures, above all things, is highlighting how much is lost in trying to walk someone else's Camino. The point is, people will wait if they know it's worth their while, and if not, it is no catastrophe. I have walked to the End of the World, and I remember enough to know that this is not it. So the plan, as of now, is to finish the blog, to focus on writing a good book instead of a quick book, and to find a job that lends itself to both of the previous. It may take until May to accomplish; it may take longer. I have time, and I have my lessons to back me. However, I have to stay on my Camino now. The plantar fasciitis reminds me of that.

In Training

I haven't written much about my physical health in a while, suffice it to say that sitting for 9 hours a day, 5 to 7 days a week, takes its toll. The back aches, the eyes blur, and the... well, we'll leave it with back and eyes for the time being.

In any case, things are about to be shaken up in a few short weeks. I'm going to be unemployed! Huzzaaa... what was that again? Yup, after being extended from 4 months to 13 months at Disney, I am about to reach my last extension. Then the playing field changes, and for at least one month, I will no longer take my seat in the shitty chair with the corroding back support and the poor lighting that magnifies the deleterious effects of an otherwise thoroughly adjusted computer screen. Instead, I will fly to Spain. On a plane. To cross the plain. In the rain. AND NOT ONCE COMPLAIN.

I've had a hankering, ever since Junior year of high school, to embark down the French route of El Camino de Santiago de Compostela. For those unfamiliar, it's a roughly 500-mile pilgrimage route that starts (among many places) in St. Jean Pied-de-Port in France, traverses Basque Country and the high meseta, and settles into stormy Galicia, ultimately culminating at Cape Finisterre, considered in Medieval times to be the end of the world. Is it ironic that I finally have the time and resources to walk there in 2012?

This morning, I completed my first 14-mile training walk to test out my mettle and my Merrells. I walked from Glendale to Chinatown to Silver Lake and back to Glendale via Los Feliz. To my advantage, the weather was pleasant, the hills minimal, the way familiar, and the feet new to the experience. I completed the trek in four and a half hours, stopping along the way to watch a brown widow spider kill a caterpillar and to buy a lunch of my own. Mapquest told me I should have finished in 5 1/2 hours... Umm...

One of my constant concerns with my body is overdoing it. I've screwed up my shoulder doing weights and my hamstring during Capture the Flag (getting old sucks), and Vishnu knows I've had issues with the heat on the track. As I sit here typing this, I've been back for five hours. My fingers are no longer swollen, though my legs and feet are not used to this degree of walking. I managed to avoid blisters but did feel hot spots. I will probably wake up tomorrow and hobble into work as the stiffness sets in. I remind myself that this is training, but will the little training I can manage over the next few weeks suffice? I mean, I will be repeating this walk every day of the week for four weeks. Actually, I take it back; this will be a mid-length walk.

As much as the pilgrimage itself is about faith in general, I suppose it will also be a test of faith in my body. Lately, with all the sitting, I have begun to feel a lot older than my coworkers remind me, and I wonder if the Camino will make this better or worse. It then begs the question of what comes after? More sitting? Most likely... But, perhaps, I will one day find a place with better chairs and better lighting. Who knows for sure? Those are things to address on the long walk. In the mean time, it's time to rest and plan, rest and plan.

The Upcoming Year

Wow... I'm really having trouble remembering the last couple of weeks. I think that's just the nature of the year: January starts off with the slow, post-holiday hangover, continues into March's bowl of cosmic cereal, realizes it's been dawdling at about August, blazes through the rest of October and November and explodes into exhaustion at the end of December. Then the cycle starts again. Whee.

Seriously, though, the holidays were a particularly blurry blur this year, and now 2012 has begun. I sacrificed the midnight "Hurrah!" so I could see the year's first sunrise over the dunes of Death Valley. And you know? It didn't matter that I had traveled by myself. I was surrounded by similarly minded people, and the night before, I was invited to dine with a family who then purchased my dinner (part of the "New Year's Special" menu, a.k.a. the same mediocre fare for ten extra dollars). All in all, what could have been an unbearably lonely weekend turned into a lovely experience, and how ironic that it should take place in the shadow of the Valley of Death.

I'm not making as many resolutions this year. Frankly, I overburdened myself for 2011, "My Year," and I forgot 75% of them before February even hit. I believe I had intended it to be the year of the relationship, when, in fact, it turned out to be my most independent year ever. I sacrificed the late nights for the most sunrises I'd seen in years, but I also sacrificed most of my sense of belonging to anything.

For 2012, I'd like to reverse that, but not by making a checklist of all the same old friends I haven't heard from in years and painstakingly contacting all of them to rekindle something that had never ignited. My adventures in 2011 taught me that relying solely on any one person is not healthy or enjoyable for either party. The people I've met on my landmark quests, though our relationships have not endured past a conversation, have reawakened two things that had been missing during all the time and effort I'd put into maintaining crumbling relationships of the past: curiosity and joy.

A socially healthy person (at least in this society) makes new friends throughout his/her life, so attain social health, the time has come to start expanding. If I can talk to a new person every week, it would lead to the sort of breakthrough I spent the last year convincing myself was impossible. All I need are guts, practice, and a willingness to let slide. It's a big risk, but one I'm willing to take if it means being a social animal once again. Of all the people I meet for the first time, at least one has to stick around for the second. Maybe two. Maybe that will lead to a bunch. Then, perhaps, I can stop feeling like a monk outside the abbey. After all, even monks have their brothers.

You Know... (Part 5)

You know you're getting older the first time you tell your youngest cousin "Geez, you've gotten tall."

Winter's Heat

The signs of oncoming winter: fewer leaves, more sugar, less daylight, more precipitation, less time at work, more time on holiday... But in one aspect, all things run contrary to the natural workings of the world. From mid-October to late February, I go into heat.

I don't know if it's the temperature or the spirit of sharing, but something switches in my body, and I become a moody, hormonal mess who is ready to jump on the hunt for lovin'. Rarr... For the last three years, I attempted dating during this season. Before that, I used the snowy weather as an excuse to get others into the hot tub. Invariably, the results were as follows: disappointment, disappointment, disappointment, disappointment, a little bit of longing, and a lot more disappointment. I'm detecting a pattern here...

In any case, as the sun goes down and the Christmas lights come up (yes, they're already up in Glendale), I'm feeling the stirrings again: the discontent, the longing, the lust, the madness, the fear of not being good enough for someone I haven't even pictured in my mind yet. It's all coming back at once, just in time for the holidays.

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

The big difference this year is that I'm not using the internet to find anyone. No internet, no find, no date, no projection of expectations, no disappointment. But the heat is on. Woof. There's a knock at the door and a threat to blow the house down, but this little pig needs to stay practical, put the kettle on, and keep warm with wolf tea this year. The house is still under construction. Until it is built, there shall be no breaching of doors or chimneys.

One Year Since

I admit, I'm a little off on time. Technically, it should have been last Saturday that I noted the one-year milestone for this blog; however, as I was about 300 miles north without access to the internet, let alone electricity, now is as fine a time as ever to look back.

The launch of this blog was, as are many of my hare-brained ideas, met with utter ambivalence, though it did once cause a prodigious argument on my Facebook profile, back when I had one. It became utterly critical for me to keep writing and publishing, writing and publishing, always with humor at the forefront because, I figured, no one wanted to read anything else; life was depressing enough without me adding to it. It took less than a month for me to start obsessively monitoring the weekly view statistics, cranking out more entries when I didn't get enough responses on the previous ones. I wanted feedback. I wanted dialogue. I didn't get it. People were hung up on the title. Finally, that's when I realized how tired I was of the constant posting and the constant monitoring, of setting myself up to use my personal information to please other people. I was giving myself away and getting nothing in return. At least whores get money for their services.

It's taken me a year at least to realize that I don't actually have to please anyone. Mostly, this came from re-reading The Way to Love, which I don't feel obligated to chronicle chapter by chapter anymore. Check it out if you want to learn more. From it, I have learned two truths that are gut-wrenching in their difficulty, based on my ingrained habits, or programming:

1. I don't have to please anyone.
   • Pleasing another person fuels a desire for further pleasure and becomes, above all other things, a chain. Realizing this has made it so much easier to overcome my fear of talking to people. Not giving a shit what they think about me, because there is nothing they can do to ruin me, has made dealing with people so much less stressful than ever before.
2. Happiness is not a destination.
   • I devoted nine years of my life to the search for a "soulmate." In so doing, I lost a great deal of my creativity, my focus, and my self-esteem. What I learned is that the soul does not need or even have a mate. Can we call the Enlightened Ones who did not marry "incomplete?"

For the first time in recent memory, I'm finding the very thought of a relationship repulsive. To me, a new relationship, while pleasurable to the senses, would be a spawning pool for insecurity, distraction, and self-deprecation. The idea of returning to the old habits of paranoia and codependency, of making sacrifices for the personal benefit of others, makes me physically ill. When I talk about the last year of adventures that I've had, my married coworkers wag their fingers and cluck "Wait 'til you get married and have kids; then we'll see about your freedom." There is absolutely no appeal to this.

However, I do sometimes still feel alone. It's not easy converting your love for a physical human to a love for something intangible: a feeling, an idea, or a deity. Yet, I seldom feel alone when in solitude; it is when I am around people that the feeling strikes. I spent my birthday camping in northern California, alone. I had no problem driving, dining, or sleeping alone; nor did it bother me not to have a cake and presents. In fact, it was lovely all around. The trouble came at dinner time the second night, when I was camping at Mount Madonna. I was alone at my table, surrounded by people chatting with each other. Need I say more on the matter?

So, after a year of delving into the inhibitions surrounding Asperger's, I've reached the following status: I am now secure enough to choose Will over Obligation and start building my social base, but after the years of a false journey, I am disillusioned enough to see no real point in building such a base up again. People are too busy for me, and I for them. A thousand moments of solitude eventually drown out a moment of loneliness.

Though the foundation and the walls are built, there is still an empty space inside. Building on the progress of the last year, the new quest will be to find what will best fill that space.